What, this side of Spidey, possessed an international investor and philanthropist to make the leap from a town house just off Fifth Avenue to one of the highest floors of the Time Warner Center on Columbus Circle? "He was cloistered in his fourth-floor office and felt he wasn't seeing enough of his wife and two young sons, who were spread out over the other four stories," his interior designer, Robert Couturier, explains. "Those five stories just separated us and isolated us," the wife is quick to confirm. "Here everybody is on the same floor and you can sort of just wrap your arms around the whole family." "Here," one hastens to add, is the entire 78th floor of the center's south tower—all 8,500 square feet of it. "And there's another big plus," she confides. "I'm getting ready to do this mountain in China, and I decided to train by running up and down the stairs of this building."

For the designer, the question that loomed almost as large as that mountain was: How do you bring "history and culture" to something as supremely impersonal as the Time Warner Center? The answer: antiques, the more the better—and what's more, of any given country, period, or pedigree. He saw these disparate objects all working together as densities to stabilize and anchor the rooms so they didn't go flying out the window. "Besides," he says, "in an ultra-sleek building like this, modern furniture would only have made the apartment look like a gigantic hotel suite."

"I enjoy playing what I call the game of associations, which has no rules."

It's collections that give character—"no collections, no character," Couturier pronounces. Happily, the clients' holdings already included modern art (works by De Kooning, Dubuffet, Diebenkorn, Baselitz, Hans Hofmann, and Louise Nevelson, whose monumental jet-black wood assemblage lends needed weight to the immense, glass-walled living room), not to mention Orientalia (Chinese and Japanese screens, Tang Dynasty horses, and 17th-century foo dogs, one of which "one of our two black Labs managed to chew the ear off and I had to have a museum restorer put it back on," the wife volunteers). And, thanks to Couturier, they also include tip-top furniture, French (Louis XIV right through the big-ticket Art Déco names Ruhlmann, Dunand, and Serge Roche) and other Continental (the dining room's 18th-century Italian chandelier, which shimmies when the wind is strong, and the living room's circa 1920 German globe with its encircling bronze figures that in effect make the known world go round).

"These pieces have nothing in common historically—nothing," Couturier acknowledges. "But the quality of everything here is so high, and all excellences work together, I've always believed." Asked how he determines what exactly to put next to what, he demurs: "I enjoy playing what I call the game of associations, which has no rules." The ensuing mix is so successful that no single piece can be heard screaming, "Look at me!" Organized as they are in orderly groupings here on the one floor and bathed in the unrelenting light from the windows, the clients' old things all look sharper, cleaner, and "more unconfused." There is, it would seem, plenty of rigor in the designer's M.O.—but no mortis.

Couturier kept the background simple and neutral, lacquering the dining room white so its petit-point-upholstered Louis XIV chairs would stand out in high relief and the living room café au lait to give it "life and depth." He "personalized" the wife's study with a cherry-colored handwoven-silk fabric from Laos and the master bedroom with woven-silk wall panels that look like straw (the,media room boasts genuine straw walls). As for window treatments, "the clients needed to be protected from sunlight and vertigo," he insists, elucidating the various layers of silk, linen, and cashmere he put to use. "The colors and textures all hang together," the wife says. "The apartment just has this very mellow sense of well-being—remember that old James Taylor lyric, a song that they sing of their home in the sky.' "

The husband commandeered the room with the best angles for his office. "He definitely has the king's corner," the wife points out, adding, "It's like a nest, an eagle's nest in the sky." The room took its color cue—a deep red—from the resident samurai, who is nothing less than resplendent in his suit of parade armor. "A very beautiful piece of 19th-century sculpture that is noninvasive next to my husband's desk," she describes it. "Maybe it's the color, but it has such a warm presence. I mean, it wouldn't be appropriate next to the little desk I have in my study, but next to his, which is a big desk for a big man, it looks like a protector of some sort—like a bodyguard. And now when my boys go to the Metropolitan Museum, they feel very comfortable in the room with all the armor, and they can really appreciate that they live with a samurai."

Referring to the sofas and chairs that he himself designed for the apartment, Couturier observes, "Comfort for everyone—it's a good, relatively new idea.In the 17th and 18th centuries, at court in Versailles, unless you were a duke or duchess, you didn't get to sit. Then with the rise of the bourgeoisie in the 19th century, and innovations in the field of upholstery, comfort became more comfortable. And today of course it's the great equalizer."

"Robert gives you as many as four options for fabrics," the wife offers. "His ego is strong—he's very sure about which one he likes best, but he doesn't insist. You learn to move with each other's style." Perhaps her favorite piece in all the far-flung apartment is the couple's 10-foot-tall canopied four-poster bed upholstered in a rose-tinted ivory Fortuny fabric—the designer's fanciful take on one of those 17th-century English beds. "Normally you wouldn't look at your bed, you'd just get in it, but this one with its crown really captures your gaze, because it looks like it could fly," she marvels. "Like it could give you a real magic-carpet kind of ride."

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